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HELP - Agent has put me in a job overseas with no interview, and my skills don´t fit

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    HELP - Agent has put me in a job overseas with no interview, and my skills don´t fit

    Hi

    Apologies for the long post, but I am in a bit of a scrape at the moment. Up SC without a paddle. I am doing a short SQL 2005 with SAP BW contract as a DBA overseas, and am encountering problems. I had told the agent that I don´t know either of these two, and only know SQL 2000, yet they still hired me.
    What should I do? Give up and fly home, try to muddle my way through, fess up that I don´t think I can do it, or what.
    I´ve given a description of the problems below in case anyone here knows anything about SAP and a thing called ABAP which I think is about automating SAP procedures.


    The first problem is with tempdb. The client says that overnight there are five sets of data loads that run every hour from 1am to 5am. The data loads involve loading around 1 million records from a SAP R/3 system into "flat tables" in the SQL Server 2005 database. Then a second process merges these records into OLAP cubes in the database. Then a third process called "Activation" runs to recalculate the index values of these cubes.
    The problem is that the size of tempdb sometimes grows to more than 15Gb during this process, and it runs out of disk space, causing the process to fail.
    Is this large use of tempdb normal? If so how large could I expect it to get? Perhaps the solution is to ask the client to get a larger drive to hold tempdb - how large?

    The second problem is more general, and is that a user says that when he runs a report, reading data from the cubes, it takes more than a minute to read the data out, even if it is only 40 rows that are returned.
    Presumably this is because there are insufficient indexes on the tables, but there are apparently 120 tables involved with the cubes, and an amazing 15000 or so tables in total.
    Also it seems to be the case that the SAP software itself creates and manages tables and indexes in the SQL database. Is this true? If so then presumably I would need to make any changes in the SAP software, and I know nothing about this.

    The third problem is that they have shown me a printout from the SAP system that shows around 20 stored procedures that are taking between 30 seconds to 2 minutes to run. Again this is probably an index problem but I don´t see how I can resolve this if SAP handles the indexes.

    Many Thanks

    #2
    I would start cramming everything you could possibly learn to fit what the client needs. Tell them something like "I'm just making sure that I get to the bottom of the problems, doing some analysis, before I jump in making too many changes..." That should buy you a couple of weeks at least (depending on how good you spin it), during which you study like mad, ask mates who might know the answers, search the web etc.

    Last thing I would do would be to say "I don't know the stuff I'm meant to do do this job..." if you want to stay.
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    Comment


      #3
      15gb temp space usage is not that extreme for olap analysis. the client clearly has table and disk space issues. they need someone to do performance tuning. if you are not that man (yet) can you spend some time documenting all the issues? in the meantime try and get into the equivalent of oracle's "metalink" - i assume that there is one for sap - that will give you a step up. there are some sap gurus here - you should get some help tomorrow when they login.

      Comment


        #4
        15GB? Pah! Call that a database?

        Comment


          #5
          I dont know anything about sap or sql2005 either but....

          If there are obvious disk space issues then you need more space. Disk is cheap, and it buys you time while they sort out getting and installing it. (unless there is already loads of spare space on the machine and you are supposed to be managing it)

          If they are so short of temp space then I would expect that to have an impact on all queries or does sqlserver not produce temp tables as part of resolving the complex queries?

          How does it look when working is it running out of memory or i the cpu thrashing?

          Is this any good?
          http://www.sapfans.com/forums/index.php
          Last edited by where did my id go?; 2 December 2007, 10:04.

          Comment


            #6
            http://www.zomp.net/shop/product_inf...ucts_id=480265

            What every good boy should get for Christmas
            Last edited by Diver; 2 December 2007, 10:03.
            Confusion is a natural state of being

            Comment


              #7
              Very generally, new versions of applications consume vastly more resources than old versions, in particular Microsoft applications. Do what the error message tells you to do, i.e. get more space. Also read what´s new in SQL 2005, but I suspect as is usually the case the new functions, are probably not being used.

              The slow report should be easy to fix, check that there is an index. You don´t need to do anything other than ensure index has been defined and SQL server uses it, perhaps the index was accidently dropped. Run the query analytic/plan to see what it does.
              Last edited by BlasterBates; 2 December 2007, 11:31.
              I'm alright Jack

              Comment


                #8
                Any SAP experts out there?

                Well at least my concience is clear - they can´t accuse me of lying on my CV or anything.

                I´ve got a few ideas from the web, but I´m definitely winging it.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by KentPhilip View Post
                  Any SAP experts out there?
                  There are but they don't like you mentioning it as it is something of a goldmine for them.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    You're doomed.

                    But seriously. I have more than a Tb free space on my home PC. Tell them to shell out and get some proper disk space.

                    That should buy you enough time to google a solution to the rest.

                    Comment

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